Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

gmueckl (950314) writes "The European Parliament is currently preparing a new law for governmental reglementation of telecommunication. This wouldn't be news except that it is to be voted upon in the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection next Monday (7 July) and some MEPs have proposed amendmends with far-reaching effects on topics covering anything from privacy to piracy. The French and British proposals to cut off copyright offenders from the Internet are making a return here, as is an attempt to abolish Net Neutrality and a proposal to make ISPs and content providers work more closely together fighting in the fight against piracy (which also seems include a provision that allows passing on the identity and personal data on potential copyright offenders to copyright holders). One proposed amendmend even goes so far to suggest that the definition of spyware should be altered in a way that trojans which try to detect copyright violations would be legal. And these seem to be just the top of the ice berg. La Quadrature du Net has more information on this and a call to action (in English, French and German). Heise has also picked up on this story as well as ORF Futurezone (both are in German). The broad scope of these amendmends and the fact that they pop up at the last minute make all of this very, very scary."

gmueckl writes "Since Blender got released as open source in 2002, it has basically owned the open source 3D modelling scene. Its development has seen a massive push by both the open source community and supporting organisations. However, the program has been showing its age all along and efforts to improve on that have either been blocked or have failed inthepast (note the dates). Authors of new modules are forced to jump through hoops to get their work glued onto the basic core which still dates from the early 90s and has gone almost unchanged since. There are many other active projects out there like Art of illusion, K-3D and Moonlight|3D. Each one of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower. So how comes that these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How comes developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?"